Biennial Conference

The Center for the Study of American Democracy's 2025 biennial conference, held March 26 - 27, will take on the vexing topic of immigration. Immigration experts and legal and policy practitioners will help us better understand the issues behind the headlines.

The conference title — "A Nation of Immigrants?" — echoes the title of John F. Kennedy's 1958 pamphlet, later published as a book posthumously in 1964, that celebrated our immigrant heritage and encouraged the United States to reopen its doors to immigrants, an opening we've seen since the immigration act of 1965. The question mark in the title poses the question: are we still a nation open to immigrants? Fifteen scholars, journalists, lawyers and policy advocates will join us to explore that very question.

Keynote Addresses

"Immigration Control and the Open Society" by Chandran Kukathas

Wednesday, March 26, 7:30 p.m. | Archon Auditorium (Oden L001)
Kukathas is a professor of political science at Singapore Management University and a former chair of political theory and head of the Department of Government at the London School of Economics.

Keynote Address: "Life on the Move" by Caitlin Dickerson

Thursday, March 27, 11:10 a.m. | Archon Auditorium (Oden L001)
Dickerson is a staff writer for the The Atlantic and a 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for Explanatory Writing for "We Need to Take Away the Children."

Panel Discussions

"The Ethics of Immigration"
Wednesday, March 26, 3-5 p.m. | Community Foundation Theater
"The Politics of Immigration"
Thursday, March 27, 8:45-10:45 a.m. | Community Foundation Theater
"Immigrants and the Law"
Thursday, March 27, 1:30-3:30 p.m. | Community Foundation Theater
"Immigration in Ohio"
Thursday, March 27, 4-6 p.m. | Location TBA

2023 Conference

"What’s my dollar worth?" It’s a question that Americans have been asking frequently ever since the global economy began to reopen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, sending inflation soaring to levels not seen in decades. In March 2023, political and economic experts with experience at the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Congress, as well as from the media and academia, gathered at Kenyon to consider the causes, consequences and cures of inflation.